THERE ARE MASKS

There are masks I will not wear,

backstage wardrobes I won’t dress up in,

lives someone else can star in,

fires that will never feather my voice,

or sweep the shadows

from my palace of ice and eyes,

faces that will never hang like fruit

from any bough of my being,

daggers I won’t bury in the wounds

they inflicted like mouths

the tongue has been cut out of,

dignities of desire

that will not circle the roadkill,

my wings linked to the foodchain.

My heart will never labour

like the ox of a bell under a yoke,

though I plough the starfields;

nor will I fill its rivers

with leeches and eclipses

and let it sip the blood of others

to nourish my own lust.

I will not smudge the clarity of my heat

with greenwood, not sacrifice

the hawk’s eye for the ant’s,

cloud the integrity of love with acrid reason.

I will not eat the days

like spoonfuls of my own ashes,

a martyr to my own orthodoxies,

trying to be true to a creed of fire

that moves underground like a root-fire

in a choir of cedars, the forbidden flame

smouldering, trying to bite its own tail,

trying to put itself out with its own tears

for the best of reasons,

for lost earrings in a coffin.

Anyone can see

you’re a raven worthy of silver

who’s roofing her wings with tin,

an urgent orchid with flare

trying to bloom in the shadow

of a nightshift toy factory.

Your wingspan

should be measured in horizons

from dawn to dusk; and you

free to ride your own thermals,

to slide yourself like a theshold or a love-letter

under the door of the wind,

to take the hood off your sky

and explore your own vastness,

all the bridges you built

to lie in the shadows

of the burning cherry trees,

true to your own emergency,

true to your own fingertips and eyes,

the impulse of the serpent at the gate

who whispers to you like skin

when the candles go out,

who comes to you like water to a witching wand

a root-god to the poppy

that shudders with black lightning

to be consumed like a torch in her own flames,

to drown in the black rose

of an exquisite oblivion,

naked in a moist parachute that blooms

like a smile you’d thought you’d lost.

The butterfly can’t be

stuffed back into the cocoon,

the bird back into the egg,

the pearl back into the grain of sand

that grew a palace

out of the tiniest foundation stone.

Fire is not a flower of ashes

that sheds its petals twice.

There are roads that disappear

like stray threads of hair

over our shoulders

even as we walk them,

every step farewell and arrival,

as time yeasts the envelope

with crucial stars that make things happen,

the wheatfield of an autumn letter

in the loaf of the hollow mailbox

rising like dawn out of a dark mouth

over its own harvest.

You can’t live forever like a sentence

balked at the fang marks of the colon

you can’t remember biting you.

Because life is not punctuated

any more than space,

things will follow

the promise of the serpent’s tattoo

to die back into life,

the black lioness

of your passionate constellation,

not a nun at the stake

of a forbidden lust to live,

but a new moon at the opening gates

of the parenthetical secret

between two crescents.

Are you afraid

to let your life graze like wild horses

on the grasslands

of your own transformations,

do you desecrate a greater law

to obey a smaller;

would you tie your last lifeboat,

your last island full of moonlight

to the sunken pillars of a wharf

that aged like a palace,

an endless prelude

to a book of farewell

that collapsed under the weight

of its own hesitation

to read itself to the end?

Even now your foundation-stones

are turning into quicksand

and the abyss

of what you must jump into

to follow your wings

out of the barnyard

opens like a mouth

trying to clear a wishbone

or a song from its throat.

Are you afraid

to give up your collection of hats,

those skies and overturned nests you walk under,

a hawk behind chicken-wire

for a bough in the wild

without a return address?

I want to hear the nightbird sing

that dazzles the serpent

with the joy of her own being,

slowly ascending the tree like a stairwell

to seize her in the dark rapture

of his amorous coils

and drown her in tide after tide of transfiguring wine,

the secret oceans of bliss

that lie hidden

in every drop of blood, every tear

that falls from the thorns

of the black star that burns like a rose

in the mouth of the dragon

that is waiting like wings

at her bruised heel

for her to wash off the old mythologies,

naked in the eye of the rain,

and mount the taboo and eclipse

of her own repealed desire

and fly from the graveyard firepits

of the grounded comets

praying for a match in hell

to light the pyres of their own cremations.

Ill omen or good,

the brush is loaded with red,

with roses, blood, fire,

and the sky is primed

like the virgin seabed of the canvas before you.

Staring will not paint the apple

you want to bite into,

install the serpent like a voice

in the tree that tempts you,

run the fingers of the nightwind

through your raven hair like a mad pianist

trying to tune your keyboard

to the crazed scales of the full moon.

If you want to dance naked

under chandeliers of black cherries,

alive enough to get away with yourself

don’t turn your eyes to glass

and scan the heavens

like the small end of a telescope

to see if you can spot your own approach

like an astronomical catastrophe

that will burn the house down,

the matchbook flaring of a coffin

that docks like a death-boat

to take on a cargo of ashes;

but lay down one stroke of paint,

risk your own interstellar spaces once,

leap like a wounded dolphin

from the wave of the mirror once,

and life will strew stars in your path

that will awake the dreamer

like gardens in the furrows

of your salted fields.

You will stop living

like an arsonist in a volunteer fire-brigade

before the blaze of your own hunger

for heat and light

and run like a sudden thaw of honey

from the frozen hive

that wants to ride its own melting

like a forge pouring out the hot metals

of the enchanted swords

the dark magicians plunge into the stone

to sort the jesters from the crowns.

PATRICK WHITE